Getting Caught in “The Act”

The summer after my sophomore year of high school was an interesting one.

Going to sleep away camp for most of my childhood years and then being on staff at the camp was something I was looking forward to. For years I thought that being a camp counselor and lifeguard, a place that I had such fond memories of, seemed to be quite a perk.

During the day, I spent my time out on the dock teaching canoeing lessons and running swim teams on the lake. I enjoyed sitting on the tall lifeguard chair overlooking the beautiful sunset. In the evenings, I was assigned to take care of and be responsible for the youngest group of kids at the camp.

Although this was great, the best thing a counselor can hear besides, “time off” or getting a raise are the words, intersession weekend. Now intersession weekend was the break weekend where campers were back at home for one night every two weeks.That one night was heaven for the staff members.

During this one night we would do things like have marathon movie night, eat tons of junk food, go swimming and canoeing after dark, and my personal favorite, play pranks the other camps on the lake.

Most staff members were used to the usual prank procedures. Some counselors were assigned to be guards on the look out, incase other camps were planning a surprise attack. However, the one thing that I wanted to hear most from the head counselor was, “it’s your turn to go prank.”

10 of us were going to put shaving cream in the other camp’s dining room, toilet paper their tents and saran wrap their bathroom doors shut.

The whole team wore black colored outfits, got our supplies and off we went to the other side of the lake.

We got to the other camp and started to mess up the dining hall. There was shaving cream almost covering the entire dining hall, yarn going from one end of the hall to the other making a maze and we flipped over all their tables. Well, it turns out we were making way too much noise and some of their staff members heard us.

As we were midway into finishing up, a few of the staff members from the other camp caught us. We were then demanded to go back to our camp base and left to deal with the mess in the morning.

The morning after, myself and a few other staff members were called into my boss’s office. I was quite nervous and scared I was going to get fired. Everyone apologized at the meeting to the other camp’s head staff, and after the meeting, my boss made us stay for a little chat. Turns out she was proud of us and happy we conducted ourselves in such a respectable manner after the fact.

Then again you know what the saying is, “if you give a kid permission to do something, they’re going to take as much as they can get for the sake of it.”